Thoughts on Life, Love, Politics, Hypocrisy and Coming Out in Mid-Life

Monday, June 19, 2017

Virginia's Wake-Up Call to the Morally Decent Republicans

Ed Gillespie and extremist Corey Stewart

Having grown up in the Republican Party and then having been an activist, I know that for many it is easy to push out of mind the fact that what they knew Republican Party to be in the past simply no longer exists. Yes, Republican Women's club still have their functions and locally in Virginia Beach, they still hold the Star Spangled Ball (the last one was in April, 2017, at the Hilton Virginia Beach Oceanfront) to raise funds for Republican candidates. The truth is, however, that many of these long time Republican women have no more in common with much of the party's base today that the man in the moon. Most are educated, polite, relatively well informed even if Fox News viewers, and are neither white supremacists or religious fanatics. As the recent Virginia Republican gubernatorial primary results underscored, that cannot be said for much of the GOP base be it in Virginia or elsewhere. The issue thus becomes this: when will these people - and this applies to a number of our neighbors and friends at the yacht club - cease closing their eyes and voting Republican because it is what they know and are used to doing for decades? I witnessed the beginning of the take over of the party base by the Christofascists. Now, the racists and white supremacists have joined them in hijacking the GOP. As a piece in The Atlantic argues, it is time for a wake up call for both morally decent Republicans (some do exist) and the party establishment that has utterly lost control. Here are article highlights:

Ever since
Donald Trump became president, wary Republican elites have believed he was an
anomaly—a unique candidate who owed his success to celebrity appeal and weak
opposition, despite some noxious views and behavior. Take away Trump the
person, they believed, and there would be no Trump phenomenon.

That viewpoint
got a rude wake-up call this week, in a Virginia Republican primary that wasn’t
supposed to be a contest at all. And while the GOP establishment’s preferred
candidate still won, the surprise result showed there’s still a substantial
appetite in the party’s base for the populist impulses Trump represents.

[T]his
year, it was Democrats whose primary looked like a pitched battle. Two
well-credentialed progressives—one the sitting lieutenant governor, the other a
former congressman and Obama administration official—were locked in a battle
for the party’s soul. But despite polling showing a tight race, the Democratic
establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, pulled out an easy win,
defeating Tom Perriello by a 12-point margin.On
the Republican side, meanwhile, Ed Gillespie expected to coast to an easy
victory over his main challenger, Corey Stewart, a Trump acolyte who highlighted
his hard line on immigration and support for Confederate monuments. It doesn’t
get much more “establishment” than Gillespie, a former D.C. lobbyist and
chairman of the Republican National Committee. Polls had shown Gillespie up by
20 points over Stewart, a local county board chairman. Gillespie had all the
major endorsements and many times as much money as Stewart.Gillespie and
Stewart’s vote totals hovered within a point of each other for hours after the
polls closed. Gillespie was finally declared the winner by just over 1
percentage point, drawing 43.7 percent of the vote to Stewart’s 42.5 percent.

I spent the
weekend before Tuesday’s vote following Stewart and Gillespie, on the theory
that their primary was an early test of the Trump era’s most pressing political
question: whether the unorthodox new president represents a long-term political
realignment or just a weird one-off. Had Gillespie walked away with the primary
as expected, it might have been evidence that the Republican fever had broken,
and that the GOP was looking to return to business as usual with sensible,
practical candidates rather than race-baiting firebrands.

Virginia isn’t exactly Trump country:
The state went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Trump won the state’s primary
by a narrow margin over Marco Rubio. Despite its Southern geography, Virginia
today is an urban, transient, diverse, highly educated state, where many local
Republican activists are wealthy consultants and lobbyists like Gillespie.

Gillespie’s
campaign was premised on the notion that Virginia Republicans were looking for
a candidate who, while not openly repudiating Trump, was the polar opposite of
Trump in temperament and orientation, emphasizing tax cuts and economic growth
over culture-war controversies.

Stewart’s theory
was the opposite: that Trump changed everything and showed what the GOP base
was really looking for. Serving as the Trump campaign’s Virginia state chairman
last October, he led activists in a march on the RNC headquarters, where he
charged that the “establishment pukes” were undermining Trump’s campaign.

The Stewart
supporters I spoke to, at a campaign rally in a diner in Fredericksburg, were
galvanized by his nationalist message.There were numerous Confederate flag
bumper stickers in the parking lot, and one woman wore a stars-and-bars hat
with the word “REBEL.” They told me they were disgusted with Republican leaders
like House Speaker Paul Ryan, and put all their faith in Trump.

On Tuesday,
there turned out to be a lot more of these types of Republican voters than Ed
Gillespie expected. . . . . Democrats were clearly energized: More than 540,000
turned out to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to 370,000 in the
Republican primary.

Stewart, of
course, believed he was going to win, and he didn’t. But in coming as close as
he did, he gave the Republican establishment a scare—and showed that a sizable
portion of the GOP base doesn’t want to go back to business as usual. Far from
being weary of the controversial and unorthodox president, a lot of Republicans
want more candidates like Trump.

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Out gay attorney in a committed relationship; formerly married and father of three wonderful children; sometime activist and political/news junkie; survived coming out in mid-life and hope to share my experiences and reflections with others.
In the career/professional realm, I am affiliated with Caplan & Associates PC where I practice in the areas of real estate, estate planning (Wills, Trusts, Advanced Medical Directives, Financial Powers of Attorney, Durable Medical Powers of Attorney); business law and commercial transactions; formation of corporations and limited liability companies and legal services to the gay, lesbian and transgender community, including birth certificate amendment.

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